Portable Eucharist

Run through all the words of the holy prayers [in Scripture],
and I do not think that you will find anything in them
that is not contained and included in the Lord’s Prayer. – St. Augustine

[A journal stream of consciousness, unedited, untranslated, after praying with Monday’s Gospel at Mass which was Jesus’ teaching of the Our Father]

Ever since Dr. Kenneth Bailey said in a 2000 lecture, “the Lord’s prayer is the peasant’s psalter,” I have become more and more captivated by this prayer’s extraordinary beauty and power. It’s why I placed it at the heart of the Eli Chaplet and framed it with a litany of unconditional consenting.

Bailey’s comment of ‘peasant’s psalter’ refers to the 150 Psalms that are the Jewish book of prayer, which illiterate peasants did not have access to memorizing. So Jesus gave them a portable, compressed, simplified distillation of all 150. The seven petitions of the Our Father, Bailey said, contain a concise summary of all the major themes of the psalms, save one: the curse psalms. Jesus drops cursing Israel’s enemies because he was to bring them to fulfillment on the cross as he himself became a curse for us, thereby removing sin’s curse from us (Gal. 3:13). In place of the curse psalms, Jesus places a radical clause of unconditional forgiveness: forgive us in the measure that we forgive others.

More recently, as I was preparing that lecture on “the Eucharist and the baptismal priesthood of the laity,” I had this new insight: the Our Father is the ‘portable Eucharistic prayer’ of the lay faithful. I have not prayed the same since.

[The Eucharistic prayer (EP) – or Anaphora — in the Mass is that long text the celebrant prays following the Holy, Holy, Holy and concluding with the Great Amen.]

It is a prayer of remembrance of God’s saving work in history, culminating in Christ. It is also a petition for God to remember us. The EP is a living memory that makes present and active what is remembered: the cross, the tomb, the resurrection, the ascension and the coming of Christ again in glory – this ‘paschal complex’ is made wholly present in mystery through sacramental signs in the Liturgy.

The Eucharistic prayer is also a prayer of invocation, calling down the Pentecostal Spirit of Jesus, coming as invisible Fire — like the dewfall — to bear into this world the Manna from Heaven, Jesus Christ. The Spirit brings the super-substantial Bread that is to be consumed each Sunday, the new Sabbath of the Lord’s Day. It is given as strength for the journey ahead.

The Eucharistic prayer is also a prayer of offering, as the faithful, by a free act of consent sealed through an Amen, splice their lives to the exodus-sacrifice of the slain and Risen Christ who draws all things to himself — returning us, and all creation with us, to the Father who sent him into the world to deliver us from evil by making us, nature’s priests, into the freed children of our common Father in heaven.

This is the Our Father. Remembrance, invocation, offering.

The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer of remembrance in that gathers together the whole of salvation history as God’s fatherly work of repairing a world fallen into ruin; of repairing humanity as the world’s rightful Gardeners and image-bearers whom God made to till the earth, offering its fruits back to the Creator.

The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer of remembrance, invocation and offering conceived and composed in the Heart of the God-Man. Christ created this prayer in his Heart to recapitulate the whole memory of Israel contained in the Sacred Scripture. The Prayer is the fruit of his internalization and re-forming of the Scriptures through his own divine-human mind.

The Our Father is a window into Christ’s read of the sacred history of his People, the People whom he, as God’s Word, once chose, called, delivered from slavery and fed in the wilderness with Manna as he led them – through great trials — toward the Promised Land of the Kingdom of God. That Land is where God’s will is to-be-done, so that heaven and earth might join, above all in the Temple that is his people Israel. His Prayer gathers us now into One to sanctify the Father’s Name, with the Son, in the heart of the City of Peace.

The Our Father is shaped as a literary X “chiasm.” This means it has a center petition on which all the other six petitions hinge. That center is the key unlocking the whole:

Our Father who are in heaven

Sanctify your Name (1)
Let your kingdom come (2)
Let your will be done, as in the heavens so on the earth (3)
Give us today our super-substantial [epiousion] bread (center)
Forgive us as we forgive (5)
Let us not succumb to the test (6)
But deliver us from evil (7)

The first three petitions: Israel’s call to manifest God’s Name-kingdom-will. The last three petitions: God freeing his people from slavery that prevented them from heeding their liturgical call. And all six of these petitions center around the CORE epiclesis-plea for super-substantial bread, for Manna, for the Bread from Heaven that bedews the earth and becomes “what-is-this?” (great word for transubstantiation) nourishment for us priests called to join heaven and earth.

It’s all awe inspiring and makes me tremble a bit more when I pray the words.

Every time I pray the Our Father, I more and more feel the whole force of the Mass, of the Eucharistic Liturgy, of the God-Man recreating creation in and through my miserable me. The Lord’s Prayer extends the theandric labor of the Tekton in the Mass out into every-time-and-space of my life. A Midas touch. I feel the Prayer impelling me to allow the super-substantial transubstantiation of the bread and wine — THAT I INGESTED at Mass (God help me) — to sanctify, consecrate, make celestial my body-soul and thereby the world under my sway. All under my epiclesis, that I might “lift up my heart” in oblation to our Father through, with and in his Only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Amen.

No wonder the Our Father comes right after the Great Amen: it says it all, contains it all, and collapses heaven and earth together in one great Holy Communion. Dare we pray this? Dare I receive its fruits? My Lord…